Homeless Girl Quotes

Sometimes it's moments like that, real complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realize that even hard times have things in them that make you feel alive. And then there's music, and girls, and drugs, and homeless people who've read Pauline Kael, and wah-wah pedals, and English potato chip flavors, and I haven't even read Martin Chuzzlewit yet... There's plenty out there.

Once, my little sister was walking down the street in her thick black glasses, and a homeless man muttered, “Talk nerdy to me.

As a child, my idea of the West was that it was a miasma of poverty and misery, like that of the homeless 'Little Match Girl'in the Hans Christian Andersen story. When I was in the boarding nursery and did not want to finish my food, the teacher would say:'Think of all the starving children in the capitalist world!

The Church isn’t just for those who believe in God. It’s for those who don’t have anything to believe in. The lonely, lost and homeless. A place of refuge.

Great. I’m crying now. I’m a purseless, crying, violent, homeless girl. And as much as I don’t want to admit it, I think I might also be heartbroken.

This is what it means to be Iraqi under ISIS, I thought. We are homeless. Living at checkpoints until we live at refugee camps.

If I want my life to matter, these eyes can't see who I really am. Who I'm striving hard not to be. The homeless girl hiding in front of them.

On the train, the tears come, and I don’t care if people are watching me; for all they know, my dog might have been run over. I might have been diagnosed with a terminal illness. I might be a barren, divorced, soon-to-be-homeless alcoholic.

You never knew what to expect with Ingrid. One minute she could be sawing the locks off Pierpont's freezers; the next, providing shelter for the homeless birds of Switzerland.

The simmering lust, the raging interest exploded into love. Who wouldn’t fall in love with a man who took the time to feed a homeless kitty? She held that image against her heart like a secret jewel. Only she knew about it, she was sure. Those girls Liam might’ve slept with, girls who left their panties in his locker or wrote things about him on the bathroom walls…they didn’t know what Posey knew— Liam Declan Murphy was not just the hottest thing ever to grace Bellsford High…he was a softy, too.

Nezhdanov's heart began to beat violently and he lowered his eyes involuntarily. This girl, who had fallen in love with a homeless wretch like him, who trusted him, who was ready to follow him, to go with him towards one and the same goal — this wonderful girl — Marianna — at that moment was, for Nezhdanov, the embodiment of everything good and just on earth; the embodiment of that love, that of a family, sister or wife, which he had not experienced; the embodiment of homeland, happiness, struggle and freedom.

Suicide, I decided, hurt. A lot. Clearly, this had been a bad idea. I wouldn’t be trying that again.

Before I packed up, my best friend told me how her friend had witnessed a rat giving birth on a homeless lady’s lap on the subway. And that single image pretty much sums up New York.

I heard a low growl and realized it was coming from my own throat. Fuck the fear and fuck the insecurities. I was worth fighting for. Every woman was worth fighting for. Didn't matter if they were trash or addicts or rich or popular. Didn't matter if they dressed like a homeless waif, or in tight skirts and heels, or in jeans and flannel. No one deserved to feel hopeless and worthless the way this goddamn asshole wanted me to feel and, I had no doubt, made other girls feel.

Tonight, though, he could not help seeing his mother as a spiritual sister to the beautiful, needy and depressive girl who had broken apart on a frozen road, and to the plain, homeless outsider now lying in the chilly morgue. Leda, Lula and Rochelle had not been women like Lucy, or his Aunt Joan; they had not taken every reasonable precaution against violence or chance; they had not tethered themselves to life with mortgages and voluntary work, safe husbands and clean-faced dependants: their deathsm therefore, were not classed as "tragic", in the same way as those of staid and respectable housewives. How easy it was to capitalise on a person's own bent for self-destruction; how simple to nudge them into non-being, then to stand back and shrug and agree tnat it had been the inevitable result of a chaotic, catastrophic life.

I couldn't get you out of my head after we met. I told myself it was the novely of an innocent Neph girl, but it was more than that. You see the best in everyone." He paused to kiss my earlobe. "You drove me mad that trip, little Ann. I'd never been more terrified of my own self than I was when I realized I fancied you. And then you gave me that homeless woman all of your money in Hollywood, and that was it. I was done.

I stared down at my hands and saw the blood coat them, how warm and real something felt when it wasn’t just ink and stains. This was life and I was holding it in my hands. I drew my eyes back up and beneath the flickering streetlight and the throng of drunken cattle, I saw nothing else but the dead girl. Somebody out there had taken her life, her heart, and there I was with her warm, sticky blood. Feeling the most alive I’d felt in years. I had to find him. I just had to.

How do I know Michael hasn't met some other girl? Some Floridian girl, with long,sun-streaked hair, and a tan,and breasts? Who has access to the Internet and isn't cooped up in a palace with her crazy grandma,a homeless,Speedo-wearing prince and a freakish,hairless miniature poodle?

I wanted his hushed conversations, his stories that transported me to another place. A place where homeless girls didn't live in train stations. A place where there wasn't hunger or cold. A place only my cowboy had taken me. I needed to figure out how to get there, and I needed more info on Cole to do that.

you—you never gallop a horse homeward. They get all excited, thinking, ‘Woohoo, I’m about to get fed!’ and then they bolt for home and you can’t control them. Always walk a horse home.

She is marginalized as a young girl in a society with very fixed definitions ofwhat womanhood entails, and also as a Palestinian who is homeless and whose entire nation has been displaced

I always wanted to be a sad white girl. I wanted to be sad like Lana Del Rey. I wanted a sadness so universal, it'd move everyone to tears. A sadness everyone could related to. "I want a summertime, summertime sadness". My sadness is about domestic violence, homelessness, gender dysphoria, intergenerational trauma passed down from Salvdorean Civil War, etc, etc. My sadness is something to observe, consume, sympathize, but NOT EMPATHAZE WITH (not to mobilize for). Most people do not know how to interact with my sadness. My sadness is so multifaceted, it speaks twenty languages.

I hear Tato's words "Mama can't come back." I can't help but think, "Oh, Mama, oh, Mama, how will I grow big without you? Don't all little girls need a Mama? I know I have Tato, but I need you too.

Ella isn't like other little girls. She's inquisitive and curious, with a heart that senses others' emotions with the precision of Doppler radar. She drops coins from her piggy bank into the outstretched hands of the homeless in Times Square, frets over the plight of hurt animals on the roadside, and two Christmases ago, organized a coat drive at her school when she saw a little boy shivering on the playground.

Whether or not you agree with the outcome, the tremendous amount that the Manhattan Project accomplished in such a short amount of time–just under three years–is astonishing. It makes you wonder what other kinds of things could be accomplished with that kind of determination, effort, and financial and political support. What if the kind of money, manpower, and resources that went into the Manhattan Project went into the fight against hunger? Cancer? Homelessness?

There is rioting in the suburbs; an openly racist party sits in Riksdagen, the parliament; intolerance is growing; fascism is on the rise and there are homeless people and beggars everywhere. In many ways Sweden has become a shameful nation.

I am doing my thing, my impulse thing: What if I leap from the theater balcony right now? What if I tongue the homeless man across from me on the subway? What if I sit down on the floor of this party by myself and eat everything on that deli tray, including the cigarettes?

But I don't know, Wesley. This thing makes me think, too. S'pose we'd got Elnora when she was a baby, and we'd heaped on her all the love we can't on our own, and we'd coddled, petted, and shielded her, would she have made the woman that living alone, learning to think for herself, and taking all the knocks Kate Comstock could give, have made of her?" "You bet your life!" cried Wesley, warmly. "Loving anybody don't hurt them. We wouldn't have done anything but love her. You can't hurt a child loving it. She'd have learned to work, be sensible, study, and grown into a woman with us, without suffering like a poor homeless dog." "But you don't get the point, Wesley. She would have grown into a fine woman with us; just seems as if Elnora was born to be fine, but as we would have raised her, would her heart ever have known the world as it does now? Where's the anguish, Wesley, that child can't comprehend? Seeing what she's seen of her mother hasn't hardened her. She can understand any mother's sorrow. Living life from the rough side has only broadened her. Where's the girl or boy burning with shame, or struggling to find a way, that will cross Elnora's path and not get a lift from her? She's had the knocks, but there'll never be any of the thing you call 'false pride' in her. I guess we better keep out. Maybe Kate Comstock knows what she's doing. Sure as you live, Elnora has grown bigger on knocks than she would on love.

After a month my thinking processes had so changed that I was hardly recognizable to myself. The unquestioning acceptance by my peers had dislodged the familiar insecurity. Odd that the homeless children, the silt of war frenzy, could initiate me into the brotherhood of man. After hunting down unbroken bottles and selling them with a white girl from Missouri, a Mexican girl from Los Angeles and a Black girl from Oklahoma, I was never again to sense myself so solidly outside the pale of the human race. The lack of criticism evidenced by our ad hoc community influenced me, and set a tone of tolerance for my life.

In the 1930s, America was infatuated with the pseudoscience of eugenics and its promise of strengthening the human race by culling the “unfit” from the genetic pool. Along with the “feebleminded,” insane, and criminal, those so classified included women who had sex out of wedlock (considered a mental illness), orphans, the disabled, the poor, the homeless, epileptics, masturbators, the blind and the deaf, alcoholics, and girls whose genitals exceeded certain measurements. Some eugenicists advocated euthanasia, and in mental hospitals, this was quietly carried out on scores of people through “lethal neglect” or outright murder.

As a little kid, an unnamed fear would often overtake me. It wasn’t a fear of anything tangible—tigers, burglars, homelessness—and it couldn’t be solved by usual means like hugging my mother or turning on Nickelodeon shows. The feeling was cold and resided just below my stomach. It made everything around me seem unreal and unsafe.

Girls don’t learn the difference between personal victory and team victory or personal loss and team loss. Girls learned that if you don’t do it yourself, it doesn’t get done. Girls were never asked to fight the war in Vietnam or any other war. But if they had been, girls would have won. Girls would have felt guilty for not winning it sooner, and girls would have restored all of the roads, rebuilt all of the bombed homes, adopted all of the orphans, established daycare centers, domestic violence shelters and homeless shelters, and girls would have processed endlessly about what we could have done to have prevented the war and what we still can do to prevent it from ever happening again. Because girls believe, in the end, everything that happens is our own personal fault.

On the train, the tears come, and I don’t care if people are watching me; for all they know, my dog might have been run over. I might have been diagnosed with a terminal illness. I might be a barren, divorced, soon-to-be-homeless alcoholic. It’s ridiculous, when I think about it. How did I find myself here? I wonder where it started, my decline; I wonder at what point I could have halted it. Where did I take the wrong turn?

Weeping willow, why does your soul cry? You are so beautiful and free. Oh, I get it; you are just like me. Looks can be deceiving. If someone sees me right now, they wouldn’t believe my story. They would call me a compulsive liar. Maybe they would think I was the kind of girl who wants pity and attention for no reason. If only they knew. We do not yearn for their pity. Maybe their help, but not their pity. What can pity do for us? Nothing.

How I crossed a boundary the night we met. How all the broken pieces of my life come together when I’m with her, even for a little while. How we’d been hanging out for months and every minute I tried to find the courage to tell her that this poor homeless kid with nothing to offer would die for her. I swallowed hard, swallowed down what I want to say, because I’m thirteen and I’m not supposed to love a girl like this. So soon. So completely.

The demographic of most defendants in these courts is homogeneous; society’s lost boys and girls, a sorry parade of abused children turned drug-abusing adults. Sliding on and off the bottom rung of social functioning, in and out of homelessness, joblessness and wretched worthlessness, their histories are scabbed with violence, mental ill-health and chaos, and their present lies in a parallel universe where the middle-class ambition of the Good Life is replaced with a desperate scrapping for daily survival.

I stick to the road out of habit, but it’s a bad choice, because it’s full of the remains of those who tried to flee. Some were incinerated entirely. But others, probably overcome with smoke, escaped the worst of the flames and now lie reeking in various states of decomposition, carrion for scavengers, blanketed by flies. I killed you, I think as I pass a pile. And you. And you. Because I did. It was my arrow, aimed at the chink in the force field surrounding the arena, that brought on this firestorm of retribution. That sent the whole country of Panem into chaos. In my head I hear President Snow’s words, spoken the morning I was to begin the Victory Tour. “Katniss Everdeen, the girl who was on fire, you have provided a spark that, left unattended, may grow to an inferno that destroys Panem.” It turns out he wasn’t exaggerating or simply trying to scare me. He was, perhaps, genuinely attempting to enlist my help. But I had already set something in motion that I had no ability to control. Burning. Still burning, I think numbly. The fires at the coal mines belch black smoke in the distance. There’s no one left to care, though. More than ninety percent of the district’s population is dead. The remaining eight hundred or so are refugees in District 13 — which, as far as I’m concerned, is the same thing as being homeless forever. I know I shouldn’t think that; I know I should be grateful for the way we have been welcomed. Sick, wounded, starving, and empty-handed. Still, I can never get around the fact that District 13 was instrumental in 12’s destruction. This doesn’t absolve me of blame — there’s plenty of blame to go around. But without them, I would not have been part of a larger plot to overthrow the Capitol or had the wherewithal to do it. The citizens of District 12 had no organized resistance movement of their own. No say in any of this. They only had the misfortune to have me. Some survivors think it’s good luck, though, to be free of District 12 at last. To have escaped the endless hunger and oppression, the perilous mines, the lash of our final Head Peacekeeper, Romulus Thread. To have a new home at all is seen as a wonder since, up until a short time ago, we hadn’t even known that District 13 still existed.

For the first time in my life, I felt I could truly see through God’s eyes and feel what He felt. I could see the homeless and feel the sting of reproach in which they lived their lives. I could see my brother striving for acceptance and love from my father and feeling the pain of his constant rejection. I could see the popular girls at school and feel their emptiness and desire to have more than outward beauty. I could see creation—the flowers, the birds in the air, the smell of the morning dew—and feel the joy of my Father in heaven delighting in His creation. This compassion was definitely something I had never experienced before until my commitment to follow Christ.

When he was sixteen (1923), Peter got a job as copy boy on a New York tabloid and entered a saltier, more hard-bitten world. It was a roaring, lush, lousy tabloid. Everybody was drunk all the time. The managing editor hired girl reporters on condition they sleep with him. New staffs moved in and were mowed down like the Light Brigade. Chorus girls, debutantes, and widows suspected of murdering their husbands were perched on desks with their thighs showing to be photographed. An endless parade of cranks, freaks, ministers, actresses, and politicians moved through the big babbling room, day and night. The city editor went crazy one afternoon. So did his successor. And among the typewriters and the paste pots and the thighs, Peter walked with simple delight. A young reporter took a liking to him, found he was homeless, and insisted he share an elegant bachelor apartment uptown. There were constant parties, starting at dawn and ending as the hush of twilight settled over the city. People went to work and went to parties until they got the two pursuits confused and never noticed the difference. Whisky was oxygen, women were furniture, thinking was masochism.

With its rapidly increasing population, religious and royal wars, Irish ethnic cleansing, and fear of rising crime, Britain excelled among the European imperial powers in shipping its people into bondage in distant lands. An original inspiration had flowed from small-scale shipments of Portuguese children to its Asian colonies before the Dutch supplanted the Portuguese as the world's premier long-range shippers. Vagrant minors, kidnapped persons, convicts, and indentured servants from the British Isles might labor under differing names in law and for longer or shorter terms in the Americas, but the harshness of their lives dictated that they be, in the worlds of Daniel Defoe, "more properly called slaves." First in Barbados, then in Jamaica, then in North America, notably in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, bound Britons, Scots, and Irish furnished a crucial workforce in the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1618, the City of London and the Virginia Company forged an agreement to transport vagrant children. London would pay £5 per head to the company for shipment on the Duty, hence the children's sobriquet "Duty boys." Supposedly bound for apprenticeship, these homeless children—a quarter of them girls—were then sold into field labor for twenty pounds of tobacco each.

A mover started in on a girl’s bedroom, painted pink with a sign on the door announcing THE PRINCESS SLEEPS HERE. Another took on the disheveled office, packing Resumes for Dummies into a box with a chalkboard counting down the remaining days of school. The eldest child, a seventh-grade boy, tried to help by taking out the trash. His younger sister, the princess, held her two-year-old sister’s hand on the porch. Upstairs, the movers were trying not to step on the toddler’s toys, which when kicked would protest with beeping sounds and flashing lights. As the move went on, the woman slowed down. At first, she had borne down on the emergency with focus and energy, almost running through the house with one hand grabbing something and the other holding up the phone. Now she was wandering through the halls aimlessly, almost drunkenly. Her face had that look. The movers and the deputies knew it well. It was the look of someone realizing that her family would be homeless in a matter of hours. It was something like denial giving way to the surrealism of the scene: the speed and violence of it all; sheriffs leaning against your wall, hands resting on holsters; all these strangers, these sweating men, piling your things outside, drinking water from your sink poured into your cups, using your bathroom. It was the look of being undone by a wave of questions. What do I need for tonight, for this week? Who should I call? Where is the medication? Where will we go? It was the face of a mother who climbs out of the cellar to find the tornado has leveled the house.

Dear Willow Tree, You are not alone. I, too, have the soul of a willow tree. I have shallow roots, and I am brittle. Although it doesn’t matter to me if I am near water or not, water tends to lead the way in my life. I follow my tears as they reassure me that one day life will be better than it was yesterday. However, just like you, I love the sunlight, and the open space is a compliment. When I am in an open space, it makes me feel alive. However, I am used to being in confined spaces, and I am quickly swallowed up by sorrow. What once was sunlight becomes shaded, and my shadow takes over—and smothers me in despair. Weeping willow, why does your soul cry? You are so beautiful and free. Oh, I get it; you are just like me. Looks can be deceiving. If someone sees me right now, they wouldn’t believe my story. They would call me a compulsive liar. Maybe they would think I was the kind of girl who wants pity and attention for no reason. If only they knew. We do not yearn for their pity. Maybe their help, but not their pity. What can pity do for us? Nothing. We most definitely do not want their attention. Strangely, they give us attention when we do not need or want it. They pay attention to us as they look through their car windows and roll up their window before they arrive at the stop sign or red light. Then they stare at us and wonder to themselves, how did they get here? Pathetically they judge us, thinking we did this to ourselves. Like I just said—they are quick to show pity and give us the wrong kind of attention by judging us. I know you understand where I am coming from. They do the same to you as well. They admire your beauty but fail to realize you are trying to survive. Yet they do not pay any mind that the water is nearby and your roots are shallow and brittle. Just like you, my ‘leaves’ emotions and thoughts are brittle. I notice your greenish-yellow color. I am full of wonder, and at the end of the yellowish color, it has formed a paler green color at the bottom. Are these your emotions as well? I, too, wonder a lot in my mind. You know I am a wanderer because I have been to too many places and seen a lot of things. It reminds me of the twigs that are connected to your leaves. I am connected to a lot of places and people—for both good and bad. Right here and right now, I feel your energy, and I believe we both feel safe and loved. I understand you, Ms. Willow Tree, because I, too, have the soul of a willow tree. Therefore, you are never alone, and you never will be.

Imagine you are Emma Faye Stewart, a thirty-year-old, single African American mother of two who was arrested as part of a drug sweep in Hearne, Texas.1 All but one of the people arrested were African American. You are innocent. After a week in jail, you have no one to care for your two small children and are eager to get home. Your court-appointed attorney urges you to plead guilty to a drug distribution charge, saying the prosecutor has offered probation. You refuse, steadfastly proclaiming your innocence. Finally, after almost a month in jail, you decide to plead guilty so you can return home to your children. Unwilling to risk a trial and years of imprisonment, you are sentenced to ten years probation and ordered to pay $1,000 in fines, as well as court and probation costs. You are also now branded a drug felon. You are no longer eligible for food stamps; you may be discriminated against in employment; you cannot vote for at least twelve years; and you are about to be evicted from public housing. Once homeless, your children will be taken from you and put in foster care. A judge eventually dismisses all cases against the defendants who did not plead guilty. At trial, the judge finds that the entire sweep was based on the testimony of a single informant who lied to the prosecution. You, however, are still a drug felon, homeless, and desperate to regain custody of your children. Now place yourself in the shoes of Clifford Runoalds, another African American victim of the Hearne drug bust.2 You returned home to Bryan, Texas, to attend the funeral of your eighteen-month-old daughter. Before the funeral services begin, the police show up and handcuff you. You beg the officers to let you take one last look at your daughter before she is buried. The police refuse. You are told by prosecutors that you are needed to testify against one of the defendants in a recent drug bust. You deny witnessing any drug transaction; you don’t know what they are talking about. Because of your refusal to cooperate, you are indicted on felony charges. After a month of being held in jail, the charges against you are dropped. You are technically free, but as a result of your arrest and period of incarceration, you lose your job, your apartment, your furniture, and your car. Not to mention the chance to say good-bye to your baby girl. This is the War on Drugs. The brutal stories described above are not isolated incidents, nor are the racial identities of Emma Faye Stewart and Clifford Runoalds random or accidental. In every state across our nation, African Americans—particularly in the poorest neighborhoods—are subjected to tactics and practices that would result in public outrage and scandal if committed in middle-class white neighborhoods.

I noticed countless eyes following me. They belonged to shop-keeps closing up for the night, the homeless watching me from their makeshift beds, call girls pretending to wait for their next tricks on the corners, but all the while, wary of my every move. I didn’t belong here and they knew it. I could feel Les Foncés all around me, too, watching me from behind the tombs of the cemeteries, waiting for me around the corners of St. Louis Cathedral. With each breeze that floated off the Mississippi, I could feel their breath on my neck.

Unfortunately the interview she had lined up with a homeless girl cannot now be done, as the girl killed herself yesterday. She was the third suicide in a week at this hostel. Apparently when one goes, there is often a ‘domino’ effect.

All these frickin’ rich people with all this money who just want to blow it on coke and hookers. And then a whole bunch of homeless people, sleeping on all the corners, cold, hungry, smelling like urine. And then a whole bunch of prostitutes, trying to make cash. And then we all get to know each other.

With this in mind, I’d started a leadership and mentoring program at the White House, inviting twenty sophomore and junior girls from high schools around Greater D.C. to join us for monthly get-togethers that included informal chats, field trips, and sessions on things like financial literacy and choosing a career. We kept the program largely behind closed doors, rather than thrusting these girls into the media fray. We paired each teen with a female mentor who would foster a personal relationship with her, sharing her resources and her life story. Valerie was a mentor. Cris Comerford, the White House’s first female executive chef, was a mentor. Jill Biden was, too, as were a number of senior women from both the East and the West Wing staffs. The students were nominated by their principals or guidance counselors and would stay with us until they graduated. We had girls from military families, girls from immigrant families, a teen mom, a girl who’d lived in a homeless shelter. They were smart, curious young women, all of them. No different from me. No different from my daughters. I watched over time as the girls formed friendships, finding a rapport with one another and with the adults around them. I spent hours talking with them in a big circle, munching popcorn and trading our thoughts about college applications, body image, and boys. No topic was off-limits. We ended up laughing a lot. More than anything, I hoped this was what they’d carry forward into the future—the ease, the sense of community, the encouragement to speak and be heard. My wish for them was the same one I had for Sasha and Malia—that in learning to feel comfortable at the White House, they’d go on to feel comfortable and confident in any room, sitting at any table, raising their voices inside any group.

The Native Women’s Association of Canada states, “These systemic issues have directly caused poor health and mental health, economic insecurity, homelessness, lack of justice, addictions and low educational attainment for Aboriginal women and girls, placing them in precarious situations where the risk for violence is greater

Janice thought of the perils that would face a vulnerable and homeless young girl and her heart cried out to Sophie. She wondered where she had fled to and what she would be doing right now. Wherever she was and whatever situation she had got herself into, Janice prayed that she would be safe

A little white girl stares, holding her father's hand tightly. She has dewy eyes, round with wonder. as the Maxwell St. Bluesman voice sounds like the crackle of thunder. The Lost Culture of Maxwell Street

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" -Emma Lazarus

Our universe of gold Until then let the gold in me spread all across the sea, For in the sea of infinity, there is the pine tree, the moonlight, but you are my only royalty, For whom in actuality I created the gold sea, The mist , the river and all await to be kissed by your beauty, to feel that eternal reality! Welcome to my universe Irma, where everything is for you, The pine tree, the mist, the river and even their maker, Who has missed you and always sought you, Right from childhood when the universe was young and I was still a silly dreamer, Maybe you still want to ponder on accepting me as your lover, Because I live in rooms, I am homeless, but I never live in empty spaces, I fill them with my love, my passion like a true seeker, But in doing so , I sometimes feel emptiness within me and only your love can fill these void spaces, So rescue me and I shall rescue you right back, I will let you be the little girl still inside you, Who can fearlessly traverse the lengths of my universe white and black, Where everything is for you because it exists because of you!

That strange girl with that erratic red hair who once fell in love with a homeless guy and brought great shame upon her entire family. That would be me. I'm Lily Bloom, and Andrew was my father. -pg 4

And father of Lily Bloom—that strange girl with the erratic red hair who once fell in love with a homeless guy and brought great shame upon her entire family.

Inside me, there was a little girl who begged to be free and face her fears. She had faced monsters her whole life. Many doubted her and didn't think she would amount to anything, but here she was now. That little Shilletha just needed to be loved, appreciated, and heard. That little girl needed me now, and we were going to summit this together. Each step represented a milestone in our lives-- going to Disney World, surviving sexual abuse, enduring grief at the loss of my aunt, graduating from high school and college, being homeless in Texas, and now hiking the Appalachian Trail. Together, we could conquer anything. We'd been climbing mountains for twenty-eight years. We didn't know it then, but we knew it now.

I felt the seed of something strong sprout something real in me and felt a surge. I'd be in the woods, homeless, walking north with my fellow self-exiled desert pilgrims. I'd be a dropout. I had nothing left to lose.

Some people wish for world peace or an end to homelessness. I wish every woman could have as a lover at some point in her life a man who never smoked or drank too much or became jaded from kissing too many girls or looking at porn, someone with the gracious muscles that come from honest work and not from the gym, someone unashamed of the animal side of human nature.

Rejection isn’t a big deal. There are a lot worse things that could happen to me. I could be a homeless war veteran without any legs or I could be blind.

The sound of Alex revving his motorcycle brings my attention back to him. “Don’t be afraid of what they think.” I take in the sight of him, from his ripped jeans and leather jacket to the red and black bandana he just tied on top of his head. His gang colors. I should be terrified. Then I remember how he was with Shelley yesterday. To hell with it. I shift my book bag around to my back and straddle his motorcycle. “Hold on tight,” he says, pulling my hands around his waist. The simple feel of his strong hands resting on top of mine is intensely intimate. I wonder if he’s feeling these emotions, too, but dismiss the thought. Alex Fuentes is a hard guy. Experienced. The mere touch of hands isn’t going to make his stomach flutter. He deliberately brushes the tips of his fingers over mine before reaching for the handlebars. Oh. My. God. What am I getting myself into? As we speed away from the school parking lot, I grab Alex’s rock-hard abs tighter. The sped of the motorcycle scares me. I feel light-headed, like I’m riding a roller coaster with no lap bar. The motorcycle stops at a red light. I lean back. I hear him chuckle when he guns the engine once more as the light turns green. I clutch his waist and bury my face in his back. When he finally stops and puts the kickstand down, I survey my surroundings. I’ve never been on his street. The homes are so…small. Most are one level. A cat can’t fit in the space between them. As hard as I try to fight it, sorrow settles in the pit of my stomach. My house is at least seven, maybe even eight or nine times Alex’s home’s size. I know this side of town is poor, but… “This was a mistake,” Alex says. “I’ll take you home.” “Why?” “Among other things, the look of disgust on your face.” “I’m not disgusted. I guess I feel sorry--” “Don’t ever pity me,” he warns. “I’m poor, not homeless.” “Then are you going to invite me in? The guys across the street are gawking at the white girl.” “Actually, around here you’re a ‘snow girl.’” “I hate snow,” I say. His lips quirk up into a grin. “Not for the weather, querida. For your snow-white skin. Just follow me and don’t stare at the neighbors, even if they stare at you.

Among the wartime survivors was a four-year-old Makassan girl with a large mole dangling like a pigeon egg under her left eye, who was looking for her lost parents. She was picked up by a brothel woman, but later ran away to live among street boys left homeless by the war. They gave her the nickname Big Mole.

Together we'll make magic... Who had conjured whom? She seemed to remember Oliver suggesting this once before, but she hadn't really appreciated the importance of his question. Was she the dream? Was Nao the one writing her into being? Agency is a tricky business, Muriel had said. Ruth had always felt substantial enough, but maybe she wasn't. Maybe she was as absent as her name indicated, a homeless and ghostly composite of words that the girl had assembled. She'd never had any cause to doubt her senses. Her empirical experience of herself, seemed trustworthy enough, but now in the dark, at four in the morning, she wasn't so sure.

You throw a sponge into a sink full of dirty water and it'll soak up several times its weight and hold onto it. Throw something less porous, like a stone, into a sink full of dirty water, and it'll still get wet. Pull it out and it feels about the same, weighs about the same, but there's a slight change in texture, a film over it, and droplets of water are still settled into the minuscule pits and crevices of the stone. Even as a child, I recognized hypocrisy and prejudice at play, but I was also at my most impressionable and, inevitably, whether I liked it or not, I retained bits of it.

riendship is a treasure. If you possess even one nugget of the real thing-you're rich! So celebrate! Give your friend a book or an item with a note explaining its importance. Or set up a spa day. Why not add to her collection-or even start one for her! A bell, a miniature animal, an antique ...something in line with her interests. Personalized notepads are always great and practical! You could get her a monogrammed Bible or a hymnbook for her devotional times. Or one of those wonderful little rosebush trees if she's into gardening. Express your care and love for her friendship. by not widen your circle of friends? Don't miss the joy of sharing your Christian life through hospitality. Bible studies and small-group meetings are great ways to open your home and your heart. Fill a basket with food and take it to neighbors. What a surprise it will be for them! Host a neighborhood barbecue, potluck, theme dinner (ask everyone to bring something related to the theme), or even start a dinner club and meet somewhere different each month. Throw an "all girls" party for you and your friends. Volunteer at a homeless shelter or hospital. What do you enjoy most? Let that be the focus of your hospitality to others.

She was dressed for summer in Battle Creek, which meant straddling the narrow line between socially acceptable and buck naked, somehow making a strapped cotton shell and sweaty cutoffs look both girl-next-door sexy and living-room-small-talk appropriate. Kid-tested, mother-approved. I was dressed nearly the same, but looked like a homeless person. “So,

It was early April, when the light was at its sweetest, and on those sunny spring mornings, Tom sometimes felt the skin of the world ready to peel away at a touch, revealing beauty underneath-- beauty, and sometimes horrors. A dandelion clock, growing between the cracks in the pavement. A girl, coming back from a night on the town, caught in an unguarded moment. An old homeless man with a bundle of books, packing away his cardboard bed and muttering darkly to himself, unaware that the morning sun had given his head a corona of fire.

The “me, me, me” decade was chock full of killers. Not to mention, there was a cold war raging, terrorists were hijacking planes, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded, President Reagan was shot, John Lennon was killed, and Madonna writhed on stage at the inaugural MTV Video Awards. Additionally, we had foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, crack, and Bernie Goetz Though we didn’t start the fire, we had a hell of a time trying to put it out.

As the profession of social work evolved, it became a common practice to describe unmarried mothers in psychiatric terms. The unmarried mother was no longer viewed as having “bad blood,” but instead as a criminal needing correction or as a “girl” needing “a cure” for her neurosis. In other words, the mother as sick, but her soon-to-be-born baby was not. Once unmarried mothers were no longer viewed as having genetic deficiencies - the “bad blood” that could be passed on to their children - their babies became highly adoptable. Hastings Hornell Hart, an ordained pastor with a national reputation in penology and prison reform, described the standard procedure for admitting an unmarried mother to a maternity home and referring to her and the home’s “inmates” as “homeless and wayward white girls and women” who came from any part of the United States, who required physical examinations to detect the presence of venereal disease, who could be used to do the chores and thus save money for the institution, which was maintained  for the care of “inmates” by public monies from the District Board of Charities (Hart, 1924).

A deep-rooted part of me had always wanted to foster children one day. The forgotten. The unloved. The homeless and abused. It was a blooming desire that grew wings with every passing day. Reed was fully supportive of the idea, so a year into our whirlwind relationship, we fostered newborn twins that had been pulled from a drug-addled home: a girl and a boy. Mina and Jayce. Mina meant “love,” and Jayce meant “to heal.

My experience of a relationship is two people more or less compulsively playing musical chairs with each other's selected inner archetypes. My tough street kid is romancing your honky-tonk angel. I am your homeless waif and you are my loving mother. I am your lost father and you are my doting daughter. I am your worshiper and you are my goddess. I am your god and you are my priestess. I am your client and you are my analyst. I am your intensity and you are my ground. These are some of the more garish of the patterns. Animus, anima, bopping on a seesaw. These hold up well enough while the archetypal pairings behave. But when the little boy inside him is looking for the mommy inside her and finds instead on this particular night a sharp-toothed analyst dissecting his guts. When the little girl inside her is looking for the daddy inside him, and finds instead a pagan worshiper who wants a goddess to lay with, which induces her to become a little girl playacting a goddess to please the daddy who's really a lecherous worshiper... Or [like when] a woman is attracted to a macho-man who is secretly looking to be mothered.

Liz used to joke that when she was an undergrad at Cornell, she and the girls in her sorority would play “Homeless? Or tenured professor?” while driving around the streets of Ithaca. It was a hard game.

The gender thing wasn't what surprised me. A huge percentage of the homeless teens I'd met had been assigned one gender at birth but identified as another, or they felt like the whole boy/girl binary didn't apply to them. They ended up on the streets because - shocker - their families didn't accept them. Nothing says "tough love" like kicking your non-heteronormative kid to the curb so they can experience abuse, drugs, high suicide rates, and constant physical danger. Thanks, Mom and Dad!

The list of things that keep me up at night includes, but is not limited to: appendicitis, typhoid, leprosy, unclean meat, foods I haven’t seen emerge from their packaging, foods my mother hasn’t tasted first so that if we die we die together, homeless people, headaches, rape, kidnapping, milk, the subway, sleep. An assistant teacher comes to school with bloodshot eyes, and I am convinced he’s infected with Ebola. I wait for blood to trickle from his ear or for him to just fall down dead. I stop touching my shoelaces (too filthy) or hugging adults outside of my family. In school, we are learning about Hiroshima, so I read Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes and I know instantly that I have leukemia. A symptom of leukemia is dizziness and I have that, when I sit up too fast or spin around in circles. So I quietly prepare to die in the next year or so, depending on how fast the disease progresses. My parents are getting worried. It’s hard enough to have a child, much less a child who demands to inspect our groceries and medicines for evidence that their protective seals have been tampered with. I have only the vaguest memory of a life before fear. Every morning when I wake up there is one blissful second before I look around the room and remember my daily terrors. I wonder if this is what it will always be like, forever, and I try to remember moments I felt safe: In bed next to my mother one Sunday morning. Playing with Isabel’s puppy. Getting picked up from a sleepover just before bedtime.

That never could have happened if he hadn’t been a guy. For one, girls aren’t allowed to wear onesies to school. They’re deemed immodest. Because, you know, distracting female bodies pose a huge educational barrier for the poor boys. And if a girl had done that zany dance, either it’d have been sexualized or it’d have been stupid, depending on the girl. “She’s hot,” people would say. Or “She’s weird.” That morning, leaving Town Meeting, everyone was jostling one another, still in high spirits. “Andy is so out there.” Voices dripping with admiration. “He’s such a…” They couldn’t even finish. No words. Shake head. Smile, smile, smile. What they meant, of course, was this: Andy Monroe is so, so freaking cool. Right after that dance—still in the onesie!—he tapped the mike and said, “Next announcement. The Service Club is hosting a winter-coat drive on behalf of the Coalition for the Homeless.” A girl wouldn’t be allowed to bridge both worlds, the silly and the sober. To be taken seriously, she’d have to act serious, and her seriousness would make her unelectable—just as a lack of seriousness would. It was a quintessential catch-22, and we couldn’t even call it out, because it sounded like an excuse. Well, I could be that cool, if I were a guy…. We couldn’t say it, but we felt it. We felt it as surely as we felt the weight of our bodies, because, like gravity, it was a truth about how it worked, this world we knew. Girls didn’t even consider running for Chawton School chairman because, as girls, we knew, we knew deep in our bones, that we would always lose.

Of the Palestinians, some are dead, others are taken prisoner, the rest presumably are for the most part homeless or dispersed. The fighting boys who looked after me in the upper flat in Sidon and chatted with me in the tangerine groves; the bombweary but indomitable refugees of the camps at Rashidiyeh and Nabatiyeh: from what I hear, their fate is little different from that of their reconstructed counterparts in this story.

There had been a girl standing near Ourpad creek, watching Mt. Varag in the distance. Then that wonderful girl turned into white smoke which faded away. Mihran's heart ached. The weak and delicate Nana had fallen, but the strong and earthy Nana had become the dream of his life: the only thing he would fight for, one he would strive for and not achieve, though the longer he tried, the fuller his life would be, the richer and happier his soul. Where did this Turkish woman come from to steal his soul, impoverish him, and leave him bankrupt and homeless? "Tidy yourself up," Mihran said, "it's already light." "What a short night that was," Nana yawned. "What was it - a solar eclipse?" "An eclipse of everything," he replied.

Magazines. Yeah. That's the only thing that made any sense. She had picked each girl out of Flawless Friends Forever, I'm sure. In comparison, I felt frumpy and way outclasses, like I'd been selected from Homeless Dogs Weekly.

was commanded, in a dream naturally, to begin the epitaphs of thirty-three friends without using grand words like love pity pride sacrifice doom honor heaven hell earth: 1. O you deliquescent flower 2. O you always loved long naps 3. O you road-kill Georgia possum 4. O you broken red lightbulb 5. O you mosquito smudge fire 6. O you pitiless girl missing a toe 7. O you big fellow in pale-blue shoes 8. O you poet without a book 9. O you lichen without tree or stone 10. O you lion without a throat 11. O you homeless scholar with dirty feet 12. O you jungle bird without a jungle 13. O you city with a single street 14. O you tiny sun without an earth 15. Forgive me for saying good-night quietly 16. Forgive me for never answering the phone 17. Forgive me for sending too much money 18. Pardon me for fishing during your funeral 19. Forgive me for thinking of your lovely ass 20. Pardon me for burning your last book 21. Forgive me for making love to your widow 22. Pardon me for never mentioning you 23. Forgive me for not knowing where you’re buried 24. O you forgotten famous person 25. O you great singer of banal songs 26. O you shrike in the darkest thicket 27. O you river with too many dams 28. O you orphaned vulture with no meat 29. O you who sucked a shotgun to orgasm 30. Forgive me for raising your ghost so often 31. Forgive me for naming a bird after you 32. Forgive me for keeping a nude photo of you 33. We’ll all see God but not with our eyes

I recently asked my friend’s little girl what she wanted to be when she grows up. She said she wanted to be President some day. Both of her parents, liberal Democrats, were standing there, so I asked her, ‘If you were President, what would be the first thing you would do?’ She replied, ‘I’d give food and houses to all the homeless people.’ Her parents beamed with pride. ‘Wow! what a worthy goal.’ I told her. ‘But you don’t have to wait until you’re President to do that. You can come over to my house and mow the lawn, pull weeds, and sweep my yard, and I’ll pay you $50. Then I’ll take you over to the grocery store where the homeless guy hangs out, and you can give him the $50 to use toward food and a new house.’ She thought that over for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked, ‘ Why doesn’t the homeless guy come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the $50?’ I said, ‘Welcome to the Republican Party.’ Her parents still aren’t speaking to me.

Dear Darkness, I am in a dark room, and the moon is nowhere in sight. I knew it was going to leave me again. Well, I guess it is not fair for me to assume. A little while ago, it was traveling side-by-side with me. The moon is my best friend. Maybe it is sad and looking for me too. It feels good to know someone cares. I hope the moon feels my energy and knows that I am okay—for now anyways. I have faith that I will see it tomorrow. This room is depressing. The girls here are afraid. I feel them staring at me. My hands are shivering, and I am cold. My fingers begin to feel like icicles. Once again, I will not rest tonight. I have so much on my mind. I wish someone would tell me it would be alright. I wish someone would tell me that I am not alone. The walls in this small room are closing in on me. It is hard for me to breathe. I am too young, but who cares. I am just another nobody that they never see. Just when I was losing the will to fight. I reached in my pocket—I cannot see what I am pulling out, but I would know the texture of a dandelion anywhere. Dear dandelion, you and the moon are my family. I am making a wish for you to keep Kace safe from harm. I know nobody will ever tell me this, but please let Kace know everything will be alright and that I am with him, and he is not alone. Thank you. Good night moon. Good night dandelion. All is well within my soul because I know you two are here.

filling the form in.  She held up the photo and matched it with the wall, a tired, thinlooking girl looking out at her. It was set to the right of Oliver’s. They could have had them taken at the same time. She’d ask Mary.  Grace had said she had only been with Oliver — or at least that’s what the answers suggested. She’d have to ask her to make sure. It wasn’t unknown for homeless people to get into disagreements over love. When you’ve got nothing much to lose, the law doesn’t come into play when you’re asking yourself if you’re prepared to kill for someone.  Grace also admitted to being a regular heroin user and agreed to have an examination. She also said she didn’t have any diseases as far as she knew. She was the same age, too. Eighteen. Had they known each other before they’d become homeless? She’d have to find Grace to know the truth.  She went back to Oliver’s file and checked the date next to his signature. It said the seventh of September. Just under two months ago.  Jamie leafed to the next and only other page in the file. It was another shabbily photocopied sheet. Mary must have been doing them on her printer-scanner at home, creating them on her computer. She really did care. The sheet displayed a pixelated outline of the human body — no doubt an image pulled off the web and then stretched out to fill a page. The resolution was too low to keep any sort of detail, but the shape still came through okay. It was a human with their arms out, feet apart. At the top of the page, in Comic Sans, ‘Examination Sheet’ was written as the title.  In appropriately illegible handwriting for a doctor, notes had been jotted around the body. Parts had been circled with lines being drawn to the corresponding note. She read words like ‘graze’ and ‘lesion’. ‘Rash’ cropped up a few times. But there didn’t look to be anything sinister going on. The crooks of the elbows, as well as the ankles, were all circled several times but nothing was written at the sides. Those areas didn’t need explaining, though underneath, as if encapsulating the entire exam were the words ‘No signs of infection’. So he’d been relatively careful, then. Clean needles, at least. Under that, there was a little paragraph recommending a general blood panel, but overall, Oliver seemed to be in decent health. Nothing had been prescribed, it seemed.  She checked Grace’s and found it to be much the same, complete with triple circles around the elbows and ankles. Though her genital area had also been circled and the word ‘Rash’ had been written. At the bottom, a prescription had been written for azithromycin.  Jamie clicked her teeth together, rummaging in her brain for the name. Was it a gonorrhoea medication or chlamydia? She knew it was for an STD, she just couldn’t remember which. But that meant that where she’d put down ‘1’ for number of

This is the problem with neither applying oneself nor working up to one’s potential, these moments when you are reduced to a bunch of abstract letters and numbers whose unflattering reflection cannot be charmed or joked aside. On paper, I am an asshole: a National Merit Scholar who barely passed chemistry and had to take three different gym classes senior year because I failed one freshman year and dropped out of the summer-school makeup class. Three summers in a row. I led an insurrection of my classmates and refused to read The Grapes of Wrath, for which I should have been expelled. The schools I daydreamed about going to? You know, the ones with the lawns and the sweaters? They were looking for girls who got As and volunteered at homeless shelters after school; I got mostly Bs and a lot of Cs and spent my afternoons watching Ricki Lake and sleeping until dinner. My acceptance letter from Northern Illinois University, NIU, received two weeks before graduation, basically read, “Our condolences. Here’s where you pick up your books.

I probably didn't need to worry so much. There are some girls that nobody looks for. Turns out, I was one of those girls.

This girl Beloved, homeless and without people, beat all.